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THE LEDGES AND THE ITALIANS. 



The Philadelphia "Public Ledger and Daily Transcript" of the 17th 
May instant, in making unnecessary and insulting comparisons between the 
present state of society in his own and other countries, makes the most 
outrageous allusions to Italians. I, an Italian by birth, on that occasion 
preserved a prudent silence. But, on the following day, the 18th, that pa- 
per most plainly and positively called the Italians " the most treache- 
rous and cowardly of nations," and I found it impossible to allow this to 
pass unnoticed. I, therefore, on the 19th, gave that paper an Italian lesson, 
signed by me, copied by another hand, duly enclosed and sealed, and 
deposited by myself (whilst walking with my wife, a lady of Pennsylvania) 
in the letter-box of the Ledger office, corner of Third and Chesnut streets. 
My signature was accompanied with the indication of my lodgings. By 
this lesson I only intended to afford the editor, privately, an opportunity to 
prove himself less cowardly than he thought the Italians. I had not the 
least intention to publish it, although the aggression was publicly made, as 
I expected that the editor would, probably, be thereby induced to make the 
amende honorable. He has, however, treated it with contemptuous 
silence, which now prompts the publication of the following documents. 

From the Ledger of the 17th inst. 

Honor. — Public opinion is thoroughly corrupt in someoftheStates,upon 
what is called honor. Throughout one portion of the country, life and a 
hard word, or injury, are considered as equivalents, as staked against each 
other, as weighing equally in the balance. Therefore, if one addresses a 
hasty or angry word to another, or calls him by a hard name, the provoca- 
tion is sufficient for stabbing or shooting him upon the spot, without the 
least hesitation or reflection, and for which crime almost every man goes 
about prepared, or for deliberately seeking or pursuing him with a murder- 
ous intent. And, according to the code of those States, this is due to 
honor. They say that honor is dearer than life, and that to avenge the 
slightest trespass upon honor, life should be taken without hesitation or 
mercy, and that the mode of taking it is a point of indifference. Hence we 
find that stabbing in the back, shooting across streets in the day time, 
through windows at night, shooting or stabbing men while in their chairs, 
without warning, before they have time to defend themselves or escape, are 
almost daily occurrences. And these murders are committed in defence of 
honor\! And the public sentiment which prompts and justifies them is 
called "chivalry!" And the perpetrators regard such crimes as proofs of 
their courage, and regard any tenderness for human life, under what is 
called a violation of honor, as a proof of cowardice ! 

To urge any consideration for human rights, for the suggestions of reason, 
or the commands of religion, upon people entertaining such sentiments, such 
ideas of honor, would be utterly useless. To minds thus perverted, such 
considerations would be incomprehensible. But as they are so sensitive 
upon the subject of honor, courage and chivalry, it is easy to prove that 



(2) ^> ; 

their conduct is utterly dishonorable, excessively cowardly, and the very 
reverse of chivalry. Honor ! What does it mean ? They will tell us 
that an honorable man considers reputation dearer than life, and will pre- 
fer death to life in disgrace, and therefore must resent any assault upon his 
reputation, even to the death of the assailant. Reputation for what? For 
truth, candor, integrity? Let us analyze their conduct, and scan its con- 
sistency. One calls another a liar or a cheat. We admit the full extent of 
the outrage, and say that the law gives a remedy, and thus protects reputa- 
tion while it restrains infirmity ; and we add that society ought to aid the 
law, by imposing social condemnation upon the wrong doer. But the par- 
ty defamed spurns the law, and will not, perhaps, be protected by the 
countenance of his neighbors for himself, and their condemnation of his 
defamer ; and for redress, in defence of his reputation, he shoots or stabs 
the defamer upon the spot, without warning, or deliberately seeks and 
shoots him in the street or before his fireside. And this is done to prove 
that he is not a liar or a cheat, or in other words, is incapable of false and 
treacherous conduct. Yet what can be more false, treacherous, perfidious, 
more indicative of the liar, the knave, more inconsistent with the truth and 
candor which scorn any advantage, than this sudden murder without warn- 
ing, or this deliberate murder upon the first opportunity ? 

Can we find anything fair, frank, ingenuous, honorable, in waiting at a 
corner and shooting a man at a distance with a rifle or musket? In stealing 
at night under his window, and shooting him through the glass, at his 
fireside, in the midst of his family? In suddenly pulling out a pistol or a 
dagger, and shooting or stabbing him so soon as a word passes his lips, 
and before he can put himself on guard ? In our estimation, nothing can be 
more mean, despicable, treacherous, perfidious, cowardly. It springs, in 
part, from the same elements of character which prompt to lies, thefts, for- 
geries, swindling, every crime denoting a mean, false, perfidious heart, 
with savage, brutal ferocity superadded. Such men denounce the Spa- 
niards and Italians for cowardly assassinations with knives and stilettoes, 
and express great abhorrence for the Indians in shooting men from behind 
trees. But where is the difference between the knife of a Spaniard and 
that of a frank, generous, warm-hearted, honorable chevalier of the United 
States, sensitive as a woman on the subject of honor? Where is the dif- 
ference in baseness between an Italian who lies in wait with a stiletto, and 
a whole-souled, free-born, American, who lies in wait with a pocket pistol ? 
Where is the difference between the Indian who steals behind a tree with a 
rifle, and a chevalier who steals under a window with a rifle or musket ? 
In the opinion of all really honorable men, such practices are as thoroughly 
base as any which the perpetrators denounce in Spaniards, Italians, or 
Indians; and we can see no difference between any individual who carries 
a pistol or a dirk in his bosom, and the vilest Spaniard or Italian that was 
ever hired to cut a throat or poison a loaf, or any Seminole who ever pick- 
ed off a chevalier from a tree or a log. The same perfidy, the same false- 
hood, the same cowardice characterize both. 

Such, then, is the honor which prompts chivalry to so many cowardly 
and perfidious murders ; and such is the consistency of those who, while 
boasting of their tenderness for reputation, their sensitive shrinking from 
any imputation upon fair, frank, manly, open, straight-forward integrity, 
shed blood in the basest and most cowardly manner, under circumstances 
exhibiting destitution of every honest principle, every fair, frank, manly, 
ingenuous sentiment. And the juries who acquit of a most cowardly, per- 
fidious, stealthy murder, approve all this moral baseness, showing that they 



(3) 

participate in a public opinion whose principal characterizing elements are 
cowardice and perfidy! Can we wonder at the impunity of murderers and 
the consequent frequency of murder, when the whole social compact, the 
whole body of citizens, from whom juries are selected, are thus tainted, 
depraved, debauched 1 Can thus approve cowardice, falsehood, perfidy, 
circumvention, in defence of honor? If the majority of citizens would 
restrain the crimes which are now of daily occurrence, they must enforce 
the laws ; and if they would enforce the laws, each must begin by reforming 
himself; and to reform himself, each must open his eyes to the total, entire, 
thorough baseness, meanness, falsity, perfidy, cowardice of the code of 
honor to which they now cling as something more precious than life. 
True honor never prompts to crime, and least of all to crime involving per- 
fidy and cowardice. 

From the Ledger of the 18th inst. 

Murder Made Honorable. — The time has been when America was 
the glory of the world for its observance of the laws. In other lands the 
obligations of the laws were enforced by the hayonet; here, by the moral 
sense of the people. When the city of Boston was a bubbling cauldron of 
deadly excitement, certain English soldiers were tried for an offence against 
the people. The excitement against them was intense and universal. John 
Adams, the leader of the revolutionary party, was employed to defend them. 
Recognizing the duty which he owed to the laws he defended the men who 
were prosecuted by his own partisans ; they were tried by a jury composed 
of the very populace thus excited against them, and, after a full hearing of 
the facts and the law, they were acquitted. Such was then the respect 
entertained for the law ; and who can doubt that such a people deserved to 
be free'? Again, when the authority of the mother government was dis- 
claimed, and loose provincial governments were established, without the 
form or sanction of constitution or charter, the people continued to^manifest 
the same respect for the order of society. There was no restraint but 
moral restraint ; but it was all-sufficient. At that time, and long after, 
murder, if not^unknown, was known to be wondered at and feared, as, with 
the ancients, was the appearance of a comet. It was regarded with unmixed 
and unmitigated horror. Yet the men of that generation had as nice a 
sense of female virtue, as delicate ^an appreciation of the obligations of 
honor, and were as ready to dare to do as their descendents. That they 
did not kill their personal foes (for personal enmities exist in all ages and 
stages of the human family), because they feared to do it, is sufficiently 
established by their heroism in the revolutionary struggle. When true 
honor, the honor that is smiled upon by an upright conscience, invoked 
them, they were ready to lay down their lives and smile at the sacrifice. 
In those days murder was not the test of courage or honor. 

Some six or eight years since, when the use of the Bowie knife in the 
Southwest made that region infamous, this section of the land spoke and 
felt abhorrence of a practice so cowardly. It was not courage. The 
Italians, the most treacherous and cowardly of nations, were the 
knights of the knife ; and the Spaniard the hero of assassination. Ameri- 
cans, it was said, could never descend to imitate their example, or mistake 
the ferocity of a drunken brute for the courage of a hero. The Mexicans 
can surpass even the demi-savages of the Southwest in this species of fero- 
city ; and if assassination be courage, and murder be honor, the lowest and 
most degraded people on the face of Christendom are hereafter to be coa- 



(4) 

sidered the most elevated and praiseworthy. Thus was the reign of the 
Bowie knife and pistol first received at the North and the East. Bat from 
single recontres, this species of lawless violence soon swelled into the 
action of united bodies of men, in the execution of murders which shocked 
the whole world, under the name of Lynch Law. This also was nothing 
else and nothing better than the outrages of the ferocious and coward bands 
of Spain and Italy. The heroes in these scenes are only heroes in a cow- 
ard butchery; opposed by half their number of men, resolved in the con- 
sciousness of right, they would, like their exemplars in Spain and Italy 
seek refuge in flight, or humbly submitting, shame the gallows from which 
better men had dangled. 

It was thought that the time would never come when this demon of the 
stiletto could have power here. But the popular sentiment for the laws, 
the virgin feeling which holds them hallowed, once broken, is gone — the 
door is opened for the most frontless outrage. We commenced in the East 
with popular riots. They were applauded to the echo that did applaud 
again; and throughout all the West and South the bravo! bravo! well 
done! well done! rang again and again. This was the alpha of Lynch 
law. It was but a step from general to individual crime. That step was 
to murder. Secret arms, pistols, bowie-knives and dirks were introduced, 
and murder, " honorable murder, if you please," became a house-mate 
with us. 

This might have been checked. It only needed a firm and stern exercise 
of authority on the part of the Courts to check it — and it would have been 
checked. But the force of popular feeling had become too great; judges, 
jurors and all bowed down before it ; and assassination became as safe here 
as in Italy. A half dozen executions would have checked it. But the 
murder of a daughter in a fit of prepared drunkenness, the assassination of 
a broker'in a pet, the destruction of another because he had done a wrong. 
are all acts of insanity. In the name of common sense, what is not insanity 1 
And why is it, that these maniacs, the moment that they are acquitted be- 
come as sane as the judge that tried them, and perhaps more so"? 

All this is bad enough. It is sufficiently deplorable that 

Such things can be, 
■* : ■'-.. '■ • And overcome us like a summer cloud, 

Without our special wonder ; 

but it is past endurance, that we are constrained to see murder made, not 
only innocent, but honorable. It is stated that the citizens of Louisville, 
Kentucky, are about to present to a young gentleman, recently on his trial 
for a capital offence, a valuable testimonial of their admiration of his con- 
duct. Now we do not doubt that no one regards with more decided disap- 
probation this measure than the unfortunate young man referred to and his 
still more unfortunate family ; and we freely admit that it can, in no candid 
mind, excite an unfavorable sentiment against them. But the act itself is 
one which we shrink from characterizing in the language which it deserves: 
Is it to be understood that the shedding of the blood of a fellow-being — 
under any circumstances an act of horror— is to be a matter for a medal 1 
And when that act assumes a character which saves the actor from convic- 
tion for murder solely upon the plea of insanity, what is to be thought of 
those who would illustrate it, hold it up to imitation, by presenting medals 
and pronouncing eulogiums ] It might be thought that the rules of old- 
fashioned morality had, in these latter times, been reversed ; that we read 
the Bible backwards, and have adopted the motto " evil be thou my good." 



(5) 

It is impossible that any man can be surprised at murders like the recent 
one in New Jersey, where gray hairs were clotted with blood ; where the 
sleeping laborer had his slumbers mingled with those of the grave; where 
fair haired children were slain ; and even the mother, with her arms around 
her babe, was ruthlessly murdered ; no one, we say, can be surprised at 
such acts in the ignorant, where assassination in high life is rewarded with 
medals. Nor do we consider the testimonials in honor of Capt. Mackenzie 
a whit more justifiable. In cases of this character, where a homicide has 
been committed, in relation to which good and wise men differ as to whe- 
ther it is or is not a murder that merits punishment upon the gallows, it is 
not only ill-judged, but it is criminal, to reward the homicide. If the act 
is justified, so be it ; but let it rest there. For the sake of humanity, do 
not reward men, like blood-hounds, in proportion to the amount of blood 
they shed, especially when the victim is helpless and a prisoner, or when 
the ball of the assassin enters his back. Even if acquittal in such cases 
be warranted by the law and the facts, it can never, with a well regulated 
mind, justify the crowning with laurels and hailing with shouts of the 
guilty or innocent homicide. 

TO THE EDITOR OF THE LEDGER. 

Sir: — In your paper of yesterday, 18th inst. you state that the 
"Italians are the most treacherous and cowardly of nations." 

I am an Italian, Sir. I have the glory to belong, by birth, to the ancient 
masters and the modern teachers of the world. 

You have drawn the proofs of your base and cowardly assertion, I should 
think, from the old legends of speculating travellers, who have described 
Italy as she partly was in the past century, and who were actuated 1st. by 
their interest in humiliating the sole country, whose superiority in all 
branches of human knowledge made them feel their own insignificance : 
Sdly. by a desire to revenge the many slaps and kicks which their insane 
pride caused them to receive in their excursions amongst a people, in whose 
veins still runs the blood of the Roman and the Samnite : 3dly. by a wish 
to amuse idle and ignorant masses in their own countries, through catch- 
penny tales : 4thly. by their having nothing to fear from a nation that, po- 
litically speaking, no longer exists ; for, divided since sixteen centuries 
into small and insignificant states, as independent from and foreign to each 
other as America is to Persia, she has no political importance, and, conse- 
quently, her inhabitants have no hope of effective protection, should public 
or private resentments kindle national quarrels. 

You have read, perhaps, the French or English translation of the "Tab- 
leau of England and Italy" published in 1781 by a Prussian Captain; but 
you certainly know nothing about Italy as described by Ginguene, Madame 
de Stael, Lady Morgan, and a thousand other writers of the present century, 
and as reformed under the multifarious influences of the late European revo- 
lutions. «. 

In your gross ignorance you have considered Italy as one country and 
one nation, thus charging all Italy with peculiar defects once prevailing in 
one or two of her corners. The only spots where the Italian stilletto ever 
became famous, were a part of the papal dominions and the city of Naples. 
I say the city of Naples, for the whole kingdom of Naples and Sicily did 
not generally participate in the habitual vices created in that immense cap- 
ital by the Spanish Vice-rois. You pass over in silence, however, the ro- 
mantic bravery of the Piedmontese, the proverbial honesty of the Lombards, 
the social refinement of the Tuscans &c. You speak of the Italians 



(6) 

as a small portion of them were at a period when, under the tyranny of the 
barons, hopeless of all redress and protection from the Vice-regal adminis- 
trations, some intolerant spirits from time to time took the field against 
both the baronial and vice-regal despotism, punishing, under the name of 
banditi (outlaws), which are now made synonimous with common high- 
way robbers, their oppressors by destroying every thing before them belong- 
ing to those public enemies, and generously devoting the spoils to the relief 
of the poor and the oppressed. 

You know not that since the abolishment of feudal power in Italy by the 
French, and the establishment of a sound and enlightened police, not one 
single stilletto, not one pistol, not one sword-cane is to be found on any Italian, 
from the Alps to the meridional extremity of Sicily ; that there all men can 
travel, day and night, alone, loaded with diamonds and gold, through town 
and country, without the least danger; that there murders and suicides are 
as rare as the winter solstices ; that there robberies, larcenies, burglaries 
are but in the proportion of one to fifty, compared to their frequent occur- 
rence elsewhere; that there arsons, forgeries, peculations, repudiations, 
bigamies, infanticides, false imprisonments, arbitrary executions, are utterly 
unheard of; that there neither medals, epaulettes, sabres d' honneur, or 
public panegyrics are publicly lavished on assassins ; that there no man 
was ever permitted to keep in slavery any of his fellow-beings, yellow, red, 
black or white; that no archi-cowardly lynch-laws and prize fights, or other 
exhibitions of popular fury, such as biting off the ears of law-givers in the 
public streets, ever disgraced the Italian name; that there no mischievous 
prophets or quacks of any kind are permitted to send innocent and credulous 
people to the mad-house or to eternity; that there judicial flogging, sales of 
free black or white citizens, fire branding, solitary confinements, fines 
amounting to full confiscations of all property, offended parties turning legal 
witnesses against alleged offenders, and cumulations of two, three, four, 
or more penalties on the same person for the same crime (including 
death!!!) are but impossibilities. 

It is said, and very justly too, that all nations are made bad or good, by 
either good or bad laws. How is it, then, that your country, sir, governed 
by the "best institutions and laws in the world," should be the theatre of 
such innumerable and monstrously atrocious crimes, as you yourself show 
in your editorial ? Should not this teach you to abstain from making odious 
comparisons between nations, and from indulging in outrages of the dark- 
est nature against those nations that are at peace with yours, and have 
proved at all times the most friendly and inoffensive towards your country? 

Italy, Italy, Italy ! ! ! Can you be ignorant that this vocable is merely a 
geographical one, denoting a small and narrow peninsula, but very little 
larger than the State of New York, with 24 millions of inhabitants'? 
Could you tell me where an- Italian nation is to be found ? Where is it? 
You have nine small sovereign and independent populations called Sicilians, 
Neapolitans, Romans, Tuscans, Luochese, Modenese, Parmesans, Lom- 
bardo-Venitians, and Sardinians, rendered utter strangers to one another by 
the diversity of their dialects, local interests, governments, laws, politics, 
police, foreign relations, usages, manners, habits, degrees of civilization, 
religious opinions, military forces, territorial resources, virtues, vices, pro- 
pensities &c. that is all. This very diversity, and the presence of a 
Pope-King, who is still feared all over the globe, America not excepted, 
the constant permanence of two hundred thousand Austrians in her bosom, 
and the omnipotent influence of all the European potentates en masse, all of 
them dreading, as did the Frcnchifyed Buonaparte himself, the possibility 



(V 

of again becoming the humble servants of a new Roman Empire, should 
it ever be permitted to revive, keep that heroic peninsula in the absolute 
and inevitable impossibility of making a united, well combined and deci- 
sive effort to throw out from her bosom all exotic dominators. Only an 
excess of patriotism, of which no other nation has ever offered an example, 
occasionally induced, here and there, some small hut imprudent portions of 
her inhabitants, from among the nolle and professional classes of her citi- 
zens, to attempt her political regeneration, with no other success than to 
be carried, by thousands, to the scaffold. Indeed, how could they success-, 
fully face at once the armed hordes of their own masters, combined 
with mercenary foreign bayonets, and the opposition of the lowest masses 
of the people, always devoted to the reigning power, by which they are 
let loose, when the time arrives, to destroy and plunder the property and 
take the lives of those philanthropic but powerless classes of innovators? 
Why is it, then, that Germany, divided, as she is, into thirty-six indepen- 
dent sovereignties, silently endures the most insufferable treatment from 
petty despots, without imitating "William Tell, or otherwise attempting to 
become a nation? But the Germans are too many and too respectable 
here to be accused of servility, degradation or cowardice. 

Italy treacherous ? How ? towards other nations, or towards herself? 
In the latter case, no Italian population ever complained of any treachery 
from any of its neighboring populations ; they had scarcely any reason to 
complain of their respective governments. In the former, we only find in 
the pages of her history, up to this day, the brightest proofs of the strictest 
faithfulness in all her transactions with other nations. The only Italian 
treachery suffered by America is her having been discovered by the Italians 
Columbus, Verrazzano, Cabot, and Americo Vespucci, in bearing whose 
name this hemisphere feels honored. Would you call twenty-four millions 
of Italians treacherous from the fact that lately a poor victim of undeserved 
and unavoidable misfortune, and, very probably, of irresistible provocations, 
fired a pistol so well prepared for assassination as to prove quite harmless 
at the distance of three steps? Speak, then, rather of Italy as always be- 
trayed by foreign powers, but never treacherous. The names of Nelson, 
Benting, Lady Hamilton &c. have been but too recently engraved in her 
blue book. 

The alleged treacherous character of the Italians is then merely inferred 
from the necessity, in which they were formerly kept, of revenging with 
their own hands those distressing wrongs, which their civil laws left 
unpunished to favor the rich, the powerful, the unbridled feodatary, by 
resorting to the only means which were offered to them by the laws of 
nature. 

But, Italian cowardice ! Cowardly and ignorant impostors are they, 
only, who utter such a stupid blasphemy — yourself in the number, sir. Read 
Giannone, Muratori, Vico, Gravina, Sismondi &c. ; peruse the ancient and 
modern records of the super-human feats of that classic land (English novel 
writers apart) ; ask Piedmont, Lombardy, Calabria and Sicily about their 
old and even contemporary exploits, in Italy herself, as auxiliaries of the 
French against the Austrians from 1796 to 1815, and on the mountains of 
the Tyrol, in Spain, in Poland, in Russia, in Dantzic &c. Ask Massena, 
" P Enfant de la Vicioire," who lost 25000 veterans on the frontiers of Cala- 
bria, without being able to advance one single step into that quarter of the 
Neapolitan kingdom. Consult the fact of the French having never entered 
Italy, except when called and favored by- the Italians, and of their always 
having found their tombs there, whenever, abusing their force, they attempt- 



(8) 

ed to treat their Italian brothers-in-arms as conquered people. Ask the 
heroism with which thousands of male and female patriots ascended the 
scaffold erected by their oppressors, braving, 'til thelast moment, both them 
and death. Ask the innumerable foreign bravoes, who, attempting to cope 
with the Italian sword in regular duels, have bitten the dust. In America, 
sir, you have only seen, with but few exceptions, Italian orange and fig 
sellers, or a few Italian artists or professors, seeking in private and tran- 
quil pursuits, an honest livelihood — would you judge of the true Italian cha- 
racter from this scanty number of errant and humble persons ! Yet, I do 
not even believe that any one of these forsaken and isolated iudividuals, if 
duly and justly protected by the laws of the country, would tamely submit 
to the least cowardly insolence from any body. As to myself, one of those 
unhappy beings, who miraculously escaped the monarchical gibbet in 
1820, and in confidence resorted, in 1824, to these shores in search of liberty 
and the respect due to human rights, I cannot forget my having exposed my 
life during thirty-four years on European fields of battle, in defence of the 
same cause that prompted the American emancipation from England ; and 
I cannot now, in spite of my seventy years' age, have the least objection to 
meet, sword in hand, half a dozen of insolent scribblers of your stamp, sir, 
who, savagely trampling on the sacred laws of hospitality, dare at once 
dishonor their own nation, and insult, as you do, the noble land, where I 
had the enviable lot of receiving the light of day. 

Are you, then, so short-sighted as not to perceive that, by wantonly ex- 
aggerating the unworthiness of other nations,you virtually induce your own 
to feel perfectly contented and satisfied with the very horrors of its actual 
condition which you so loudly deprecate, thus offering it, instead of proper 
means to remedy its disgraceful evils, a lethal narcotic only calculated to 
prevent it from making an attempt to ameliorate its fate 1 Nor do you fore- 
see, it seems, that, by causelessly insulting twenty-four millions of Italians, 
without however injuring them in the opinion of other nations better 
acquainted than you with Italian history, you implicitly authorize as many 
learned and courageous pens to make such retaliations as would speedily 
and fully vindicate their honor amongst the thinking part of your own 
countrymen, and at the same time force them to make such disclosures be- 
fore the civilized world, as to impair your own national reputation, which, 
to a nation like yours, essentially commercial, is so indispensable. 

But you, sir, who so freely qualify the Italians as " the most treache- 
rous and cowardly of nations," because, backed by the national favor 
of seventeen millions of your countrymen, you believe (perhaps erroneous- 
ly) to have nothing to apprehend from your savage efforts to annihilate a 
few hundred innocent Italian families scattered all over this immense land, 
honestly living on their own personal exertions — are you not really the 
most infamous and dastardly of men 1 lieyour own judge, sir, and believe 
me 

Always ready at your orders, Santangelo. 

Philadelphia, May 19th, 1843. 



I addressed the foregoing letter to the "Editor," instead of the 
" Editors" of the Ledger, not knowing that its Editors were Messrs. Wm. 
S. Swain and A. H. Simmons. I now loudly bespeak the highest eulogi- 
tims of the world in behalf of both these respectable gentlemen, these advo- 
cates of honor and justice ! these public preachers of private and public 
morality ! these would be learned and virtuous leaders of American 
opinion ! ! ! Santangelo. 

Philadelphia, May 26th, 1843. *■» 










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